Month: January 2010

After an hour of the much-hyped presentation of the Nexus One, here’s what we didn’t know two weeks ago that we know now:

* There’s going to be a Verizon version before long.

* It accepts voice input in text fields.

That’s it. That’s it and that’s all. Everything else – name, specs, pricing plans on T-Mobile – was known before we broke for Christmas.

For all their talk about the “revolutionary sales model,” I don’t see what’s so different about the selling system from what Apple did in 2007 with the iPhone, except for selling it unlocked – which means that you can pay $530 to use it on AT&T with no 3G service available. Which is kind of ridiculous – if Apple got skewered for having a phone with no 3G on AT&T in 2007, how useful is one going to be in 2010?

The practical upshot of today was ‘we have a GSM phone running Android 2.’ Which is great news, as it goes, but nothing that’s going to blow people away. It will be interesting to see if they get the same sort of backlash we’ve come to expect from Apple paste-eaters every time they fail to deliver the iGasm 4G with 1080p video, a 15-hour battery and instant on-demand transformation into Beyonce.

So back in the day, I thought it would be really cool to have a little white plastic communicator that would let me link up instantly with all my high-school pals. (It was a backhanded homage to this desire that led me to use my dinky Nokia 1112 at my high-school birthday party last year.) As in so many things back then, obviously, my vision was limited.

On the way to the bar yesterday for the final Redskins debacle of the year, I jotted down a list of everything I would have needed in 1989 to do what my iPhone does now…

Cordless telephone

WATS line (remember those?)

Videocassette player w/attached monitor

Walkman

One thousand cassette tapes

Newspaper

Atlas

Compass

Alarm clock

Stopwatch

2-way pager

Train schedule

Filofax/Dayrunner

Dictaphone recorder

Complete set of encyclopedias

Camera

Photo album

Videogame system

Barcode scanner

Entire shelf of additional books

A whole bookstore

A whole record store

So in other words, I would need to ride around in a station wagon towing a U-Haul to have everything I have in my front pocket.

Every now and then, it’s good to be reminded that I live in the !-ing future.